


It Has Already Become Part Of You

by quantumducky



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Mind Control, My First Work in This Fandom, Valentine's Day, does it count as fluff if they almost die?, im just trying to figure out characterization over here. doing my best
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-10
Updated: 2020-07-10
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:21:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25175281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quantumducky/pseuds/quantumducky
Summary: Carlos knows the danger of Valentine's Day in Night Vale, vaguely. It would have been really helpful, though, if anyone had thought to tell him what it entails,specifically.
Relationships: Carlos/Cecil Palmer
Comments: 7
Kudos: 52





	It Has Already Become Part Of You

**Author's Note:**

> this fic dedicated to the condos livestream because even though it has nothing to do with condos i was motivated to finish writing it after watching that
> 
> this fic also dedicated to the several hours i spent yesterday hyperfocused on developing a solid headcanon for why and how valentine's day kills people. this is the direct result of that
> 
> title is the most vaguely-relevant-sounding line i could find in the episode Valentine since i already had the transcript open: "Hey! Here’s a health tip from the Greater Night Vale Medical Community. It’s possible you won’t be able to kill it. If it manages to burrow under your skin, stop fighting, because it has already become part of you. Welcome your new body-mate! Listen to what it has to say, and see where the new symbiotic lifestyle takes you."

Carlos knew about Valentine’s Day. Well, sort of- as much as he knew about  _ anything _ in Night Vale, between all the bizarre things that were considered common knowledge by its citizens and all the  _ other _ bizarre things they were not legally permitted to talk about. Attempts to get the details out of anyone had gotten him a handful of emphatic shudders and distant, vacant looks, but no actual information. Still, he understood the basic idea: Valentine’s Day in Night Vale, for reasons still unknown to him, brought near-certain death to anyone who received a valentine. He and his colleagues planned to stay in their lab for the duration, because it felt safer to stick together and, besides, maybe they could get some science done while they were hiding in fear for their lives.

Sometime mid-morning, when they were still in the calm before the storm- or, to be more specific, the eerie silence before all the screaming- someone suggested turning the radio on, so they’d have some idea of what was happening outside even if it was too dangerous to look for themselves. As scientists, they did not appreciate having no idea what was happening. So someone switched on the radio, and a second later, Cecil’s low, calming voice filled the lab, explaining that, for obvious reasons, the staff at Night Vale Community Radio had barricaded themselves inside the station and therefore did not have the best view of what was happening, but would attempt to report on it nonetheless.

It was good that Cecil seemed to be taking this seriously. Given the bubbly radio host’s tendency to downplay the seriousness of incredibly dangerous things, Carlos had almost been worried he would get it into his head to send him a valentine. You know, just in case all the incredibly blatant flirting live on-air in front of the entire town hadn’t been enough to get the message across. He… really wasn’t sure what to do with Cecil sometimes. Most of the time. He wished he could get him to understand that if he would just  _ talk _ to him like a  _ normal _ person, instead of putting him on a pedestal and publicly obsessing over his hair on the radio, then he might… well, he might at least be less tempted to avoid him.

Speaking of Cecil: As Carlos listened, his voice faded out, replaced by static and then… an advertisement?

A cheesy jingle played slightly too loud in the background. “It’s Valentine’s Day!” a man’s voice proclaimed. “Is there someone  _ you _ haven’t told how you feel? Today is the day! Send that special person a valentine! You’ll have their heart, guaranteed! Available at any local store! Don’t miss your chance, get a valentine today!”

“I think we lost the station,” Carlos tried to tell the other scientists. The static was louder than his voice, and they showed no sign of hearing him. He tried to walk toward them, to fix the radio himself, but his legs carried him past them to the door. There was too much static in his head for this to register as a problem worthy of alarm.

“Where are you going?” one of them asked.

He only said, vaguely, “It’s Valentine’s Day.”

They looked at each other. “Are you trying to get a video of it or something? Be careful!”

Carlos was already outside, and so didn’t respond.

He was aware of very little on his way to the nearest store. There were other people going in the same direction, but they didn’t acknowledge him, and he didn’t acknowledge them in return. Absently, he hummed the staticky jingle from the radio ad. He blinked and found himself standing in front of a display of greeting cards. He did not want to move his hand, but it reached for a valentine anyway.

The front of the card was garish, bright pink and covered in glitter and clip-art. The bright red text in the center read simply, BE MY VALENTINE. His hands shook with an effort to stop, to put it back and run out of the store, but he opened it instead. The inside was blood-red and blank, uncomfortably soft and damp to the touch. Something dripped out of it onto his shoes. His eyes were fixed on the valentine so that he couldn’t have looked away if he’d tried, and as he watched, a name was inscribed there in raw, jagged letters, as if carved with a knife into flesh. Cecil’s name.

His hands closed the card and picked up an envelope to seal it inside. The recipient’s name appeared on the envelope, too, in that same bloody lettering. His legs walked him to the checkout, then to the door. His breath came in pants of exertion and he trembled all over, trying and failing to wrest back control of his body before it was too late.

And then it was too late. The valentine tore itself from his treacherously unresisting grip and scuttled away on legs it hadn’t had a second ago, growing slowly larger and more monstrous as it went. He couldn’t move to stop it.

Once the thing was out of sight, the mysterious force controlling Carlos vanished just as mysteriously. He fell to his knees and tried to catch his breath. His muscles felt like jelly, probably because of the tug-of-war they’d just been the subject of, but he couldn’t just sit here no matter how tired he was. He wasn’t sure if it was possible to save Cecil from the death he’d just unwillingly sent him, but he had to at least  _ try. _ He struggled to his feet and started running towards the radio station. He could only hope he wouldn’t be too late.

* * *

Carlos arrived at the radio station, out of breath, to see the front doors all but destroyed. Scientifically speaking, it wasn’t a good sign. He went inside anyway. There was a path of destruction carved through the building, which at least made it easy to find his way around. At the end of the trail of blood and damaged walls, he found his valentine, now huge and shambling, with more limbs than he remembered. Cecil was brandishing a broken-off chair leg at it. He was also bleeding from a dozen different places and swaying where he stood. Carlos wasn’t a doctor, but he didn’t think you were supposed to lose that much blood. He was still alive and more or less upright, though, so it could have been worse.

The valentine wouldn’t be held off by a stick forever; it advanced a step. Cecil stumbled back. He glanced at it, then over at his desk, and made a split-second decision to run for the small protection it might offer. As soon as he moved, the valentine lunged as well. Its claws pinned him to the floor in a manner upsettingly close to literal. His head slammed into the wall, and he stopped moving. All these before Carlos, running into the room, could get close enough to do anything about it. He didn’t know what to do other than scream.

“Cecil!”

Cecil blinked slowly and turned his head. “Carlos?” He sounded dazed and hopeful, and not nearly as distressed as he should have been under the circumstances. “Did… did you send this to me?”

“I am so, so sorry,” he said desperately. “I didn’t mean to, I swear.”

His only answer was a low groan of pain, because at that moment, the valentine dug some of its many claws into his chest. Oh, god, it was going to kill him. Carlos observed that it hadn’t tried to hurt  _ him _ yet, tested the idea that he could stop it killing Cecil by putting himself between them, and got thrown across the room with a few new holes in his shoulder for his trouble.

He staggered upright and supported himself on the wall. The valentine was already advancing on Cecil again, who was too busy being concussed to do more against it than weakly raise his arms in defense before its claws came down once more.  _ You'll have their heart, guaranteed! _

"Cecil- Cecil, please, how do I stop it, I have to be able to stop it, right?"

Cecil nodded vaguely. His eyes wouldn't quite focus. "It's getting power from your… whatever you haven't told me. You have to say it."

He might have had something to say about how awfully appropriate it was of him to create a monster by repressing his feelings too much, but right now it was a little more important to, you know, not get killed by the repression monster. He half-collapsed on the floor next to Cecil and spoke as quickly and as clearly as he could through the pain of his increasingly bloody arm.

"Okay. Cecil. You are a very strange person and sometimes you say things about me on the radio that kind of make me uncomfortable, but I like you. I do. And I think you have a really nice voice, and sometimes I record your show so I can listen to it when I'm stressed out because it calms me down, and… that's all I've got. Did it work?"

Cecil gave him a slightly loopy smile and pointed to the valentine, which was now an innocent-looking card again. "It worked after you said you liked me, but I didn't want to stop you."

He took a deep breath. "Cool." The valentine was still lying there. "Can we destroy it?"

"You could probably burn it, now."

He nodded and retrieved a lighter from his pocket, which he carried less for smoking reasons and more in case he needed to immolate anything for science, and did his best to light the card on fire without actually touching it. It smelled very unpleasant as it burned.

Carlos slumped and sighed in relief. “I’m really sorry about that. Again. I just had no idea that could happen! I’m still not completely sure what  _ did _ happen!”

“Oh, lovely Carlos, don’t be sorry,” Cecil sighed. “Brave, wonderful Carlos…” 

He tried not to be flustered by the rambling of a man who probably should have been unconscious by now. “You need a hospital.” He got out his phone- the screen had been cracked when he was thrown across the room, but it thankfully wasn’t broken- and dialed 911.

“I’m okay. You saved me.” He listened without fully processing while Carlos talked, then shouted into the phone until they agreed to send an ambulance despite the ongoing disaster of Valentine’s Day. “My hero.”

Carlos lowered the phone and exhaled slowly. He was beginning to feel tired and dizzy himself, but he refused to look down and check the damage. He was fine- that was, after all, one of the major points of being a scientist. “There’s an ambulance coming soon,” he told Cecil. “You’re going to be okay.”

“Oh. That’s good.” He leaned his head back against the wall. His eyes started to slip shut. “I’ll just… take a nap until it gets here.”

“Wh- no! No, you will not!” Carlos may have panicked a little. He grabbed Cecil’s face, which certainly did wake him up fast. “Don’t close your eyes, okay? I need you to not close your eyes.”

“Okay.”

Cecil didn’t seem to understand his urgency, but he did as he asked. After a minute, Carlos realized his mistake and amended, “Blinking is fine.”

He nodded. “Okay, good. That was getting uncomfortable.”

“I just need you to stay awake. That’s what they told me on the phone, to make sure you stay awake. They also told me to quit threatening to do unspecified science to them if they didn’t send someone over here immediately, but I’m not sure that part is super relevant right now.”

“Aww, you did that for me? Carlos…” Cecil was smiling at him, but he was also visibly struggling already with keeping his eyes open. The post-almost-dying adrenaline crash probably didn’t help.

He should get him talking. That would help. “Cecil- Cecil, hey.” He waited for his eyes to come as close to focusing on his face as they were likely going to any time soon. “Can you explain the valentines to me while we’re waiting? I mean, why do they  _ do _ that? And how do I keep it from happening again? I still feel pretty bad about, you know, almost killing you.”

“Oh, no! Don’t feel bad, you wouldn’t have known.” He shook himself more alert and slipped a bit into his radio voice to explain. “Once, decades ago, there was a greeting card company based in Night Vale that got a little…  _ creative _ with their valentines. It wouldn’t have been such a big deal if they hadn’t also gotten a little creative with their marketing, and used psychic compulsions to force anyone with unspoken feelings to go out and buy one of their cards. They were destroyed by their own hubris not long after, naturally, but we still haven’t figured out how to make their valentines and the telepathically delivered ads for them stop returning to haunt our little town every February.” He stopped to catch his breath and added, “That’s why most people make their feelings known as soon as they’re aware of them, just to be safe.”

“I see.” He blinked. “Wait, is  _ that _ why you kept talking about me on your show like that?”

“Well, yes. I didn’t see you in person much, and you were always busy doing science when I did, so it seemed like the best way to make sure you knew. Why else would I do that?”

“…I kind of just assumed you had an oversharing problem,” Carlos admitted.

Cecil laughed weakly. “Well… maybe a little bit of that, too. I was never very good at not saying whatever comes into my head. You may have noticed how many warnings I get for talking about forbidden subjects.”

“Sure. Like the shape-”

“Yes,” he said hurriedly, cutting him off, “like that.”

At that moment, the sound of sirens made itself known outside. “Oh, thank goodness,” Carlos mumbled.

Cecil grinned at him. “You know, all in all, I think today went pretty well.”

“What? Cecil, you almost  _ died.” _

He waved a hand dismissively. Well, that was what he intended to do. The blood loss was catching up to him, so all that actually ended up moving were his fingers. “I didn’t, though. I’m alive. And you like me! That’s great!”

“Cecil…”

He sighed. “I know, I know. …Later, though? When neither of us is in any more danger than we all are, constantly, by virtue of the nature of existence? We can talk about this, right?”

That sounded reasonable. Unexpectedly so, to be honest. “Yeah, we’ll talk about it. Later.”

Valentine’s Day in Night Vale was a dangerous affair. Love, possibly even more so. But it hadn’t managed to kill them yet, and while past performance did not indicate future results, it did at least mean there was still a future to speak of. For now, Carlos sat in the back of an ambulance and texted his colleagues to assure them he wasn’t dead and explain what had happened. For now, not being dead was good enough for him.

**Author's Note:**

> if you listen very closely you can hear the distant sound of me wrestling the dialogue into not sounding like it's from the magnus archives, because that's all i've been writing fic of for months
> 
> i am quantumducky on tumblr as well; please come talk to me about night vale if you are so inclined


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